When I was in college in the late 1970s, I had a close friend whose grandfather (let’s call him ‘John’”) was a retired partner at White & Case. John had a number of outstanding traits, not the least of which was that his father-in-law had been the chief executive of one of White & Case’s largest clients, Banker’s Trust, and his brother-in-law was the chairman of another major client, Mellon Bank.
We can celebrate or mourn the passing of that clubby world of legal practice, but it defined a period of intimacy between law firm and client, the breakdown of which is at the heart of the challenges that firms now face.
